Thursday, May 15, 2014

The great minds of American academia have gotten together
and have decided that their students are suffering from a lack of guilt. Not a lack of knowledge, not a lack of social skills, not an absence of hard work... no, American students, especially the white ones, do not feel sufficiently guilty.

As these students prepare to compete against their peers from the
rest of the world, their teachers, especially their humanities teachers want
them to understand that their advantages in life derive largely from the fact
that they have white skin.

Princeton undergraduate Tal Fortgang provoked the most recent debate when he wrote about being told to check his privilege, that is, to recognize that he has gained so many
advantages for being white that he cannot properly feel the pain of those whose
skin color has consigned them to the ranks of the underprivileged.

Privilege —
a catchall term for the perks an individual enjoys in society because of his
race, gender, or class — has been used to analyze social inequality for
decades. It’s also enjoying something of a moment, thanks to social-justice
bloggers and their critics, like Princeton
freshman Tal Fortgang. In a viral article for the
conservative Princeton Tory, Fortgang wrote that calls to “check his
privilege” — that is, to consider how his good fortune might impair his ability
to empathize with others in any given debate — “threaten to strike down
opinions without regard for their merits” and “solely on the basis of the
person that voiced them.” Being told to check his privilege is
not overt reverse racism, Fortgang admitted, but it “toes the line.”

Mody
has some sympathy for Fortgang and his ilk. “If what you’ve been told all your
life is you’re really talented and you deserve what you have, it’s going to be
really hard to find out Maybe I
don’t deserve it, and all these other people equally deserve it but never even
had a shot,” she says. “Schools are not giving students a space to
manage that loss of identity.”

Maybe they don’t deserve it… whatever does that mean? Is
there an affirmative action program for white students, the ones who are not as
talented as they think they are, but who keep getting promoted because of their
race?

Does any of this make any sense at all?

For reasons that escape me the guilt trip seems especially
to target white students. Better yet, it targets Jewish students like Fortgang.

What about the Asian students? What about the children of
the Tiger Moms? When white students and Asian compete for college admissions,
it turns out that the children of color, the Asian children, usually do much better.

Is that a function of privilege? Or is it about hard work?
If these students do better at tests does that mean that they have enjoyed
certain privileges that have accrued to them because they are Chinese or
Korean? Or is it because their parents forced them to study all the time?

Ought they to feel overprivileged because they needed to
have higher test scores and a higher GPA to get admitted to college? If Asian
students outperform minority students, ought they to check their privilege,
thus, to do worse on their exams because their success makes other students
feel bad.

Should these students feel guilty for the success they have
earned? Should they feel more empathy for those students who did
not have Tiger Moms?

In a competition, feeling empathy for your competitor is
guaranteed to undermine your performance. Should you be willing to pay this
price in order to make other students feel good about themselves? If so, you
will be saying that they cannot achieve on their own, that they cannot succeed
through their own work, but that you are willing to condescend to them by
feeling their pain.

If your parents worked hard to provide you with certain
advantages, with certain privileges, and if people are even inclined to think
well of you because they think well of them, do you not deserve the benefits
that accrue to you. Not because of what you did but because of what your
parents and grandparents earned, achieved and built.

Effectively, Tal Fortgang, the grandson of Holocaust
survivors, explains that his grandparents and parents earned what they have. He refuses to feel guilty about it. They earned it because they wanted to give him certain advantages in life. Ought
they not to be allowed to pass on the benefits that accrue from their hard work
to their children? Or should they pass it on while guilt tripping their son for not having earned it himself?

Very few of the commentaries on Fortgang’s essay make
mention of the fact that he is Jewish? And yet, if the white privilege guilt
trip does not aim at Asians, does it aim at Jews and WASPs? Does it assume that
Jews and WASPs exert undue influence on the world because they have cheated
their way to the top?

Does checking your privilege mean repudiating your
upbringing? Does it mean failing to appreciate the advantages that your
parents, by their hard work provided for you and to feel guilty because their
successes—in the zero-sum world of the guilt trippers—could only have occurred
at the expense of someone else?

None of the guilt mongers in the white privilege movement
seems to care about the fact that some people have privileges and advantages
because they earn them or because their families or even communities built
something. What does it mean to check your privilege in that context: to feel
badly that others did not achieve the same success?

If you do, then you are diminishing yourself, disrespecting what
your family provided for you and condescending to those whose families provided
less.

Fortgang understands well the basis of the white privilege
guilt trip:

Furthermore,
I condemn them for casting the equal protection clause, indeed the very idea of
a meritocracy, as a myth, and for declaring that we are all governed by
invisible forces (some would call them “stigmas” or “societal norms”), that our
nation runs on racist and sexist conspiracies. Forget “you didn’t build that;”
check your privilege and realize that nothing you have accomplished is real.

At a time when China is ascending, when the Western world,
trapped in a self-defeating ideology seems to be floundering, the white
privilege guilt trip can only accelerate the process.

Since this guilt trip has been running wild in America since
the time of the Vietnam counterculture—I noted it in my book Saving Face-- it makes sense to say
that it is the problem, not the solution.

10 comments:

I had discussions about this with my pastor, and learned he even saw Korean Americans like himself as "white" in the privilege sense. He also mentioned that Jews were long not considered white, but at some mysterious point became "white". Its still all fuzzy to me.

What's clear to me is that there is a lot of minority resentment, and some of it is legitimate, and some of it is self-pity, and its almost impossible to separate.

It is interesting Obama got 80% of the "Minority vote" while only 39% of the "white vote" which is certainly a problem!

Self-identification is very interesting, more than just racial ancestry, and it appears America is changing. When I was in Mexico city I was surprised to see people with primarily Spanish ancestry considered themselves culturally with the pre-spanish Indians, I mean with pride, and talked about Cortés the Conquerer, although I guess it is because there was a lot more native integration of cultures there.

If "white privilege" guilt is the tool for our American transformation, its going to be an interesting one. Liberals perhaps have embraced the "minority culture" and are busy integrating themselves into the new order of things, while Conservatives have more tribal pride, and are resisting, and trying to keep themselves separate from the new America.

Since I expect continued global economic collapse in the next decade as financialization has its final death throes, I imagine the future is a place that identity will be more important.

The key idea that I see leaving our future is hyper-individualism, including the Libertarians. It's a great identity when you know hard work will be rewarded, but a harder one to embrace when you know how ever hard you work, you may never succeed, and then the "Minority model" arises where you identify yourself with others like yourself, and you bet your prosperity on your tribe.

And I guess from that view Conservative whites are already a minority in their own minds, and are digging in. It's just that they don't necessarily know who there real enemies are. "White" isn't good enough identity to feel safe, so it surely will be abandoned sooner than we expect by mere demographics.

I am so tired of the Left - their endless grievances, their identity politics, and their inability to engage forthrightly and honestly with out country's problems. I live outside Detroit and I have seen the entire play from beginning to end many times. Ironically, the biggest victims of leftist identity politics are blacks themselves, yet they keep voting for more of it, over and over and over. It seems this attitude is spreading more widely in our culture and I can see it undoing our country entirely.

I can only be responsible for what I have done in my own life and Lord knows I have done a few stupid things. I feel not a wit of guilt because I am white. Along the way many of my mentors were minorities. I have helped them and suggested that they are the ones most qualified when they were.I would suggest that the people who play this game are the ones least likely to expend the effort to succeed on their own merit. Excuses are used by those who lack the wherewithal to live up to the challenges that are set before them.One can only feel guilty if they actually have done things that create that guilt. Otherwise, to allow others to control your life is to not live up to your potential. It is time to stop treating minorities with kid gloves and expect the best from them because it has been my experience that they are quite capable of being the best they can be. Challenge the race and sex hustlers that act like a drag on the success of minorities for they are envious of those who have real ability.I have met few people in this life who do not have the capability and capacity to grow and succeed if they don't let those who are afraid of their success keep them down. The only true enemy most people have is themselves especially in this country.If one wants to become the best they can be then the first thing they have to flee the Liberal Plantation which will keep them in thrall to people who really do believe they are better and don't think you have the ability to succeed. And stop being a slave to any political party for what has it really gained you.

Growing up in 1960's/70's San Francisco, we were children of European immigrants. All around us were Irish, Italian, German, Russian, Polish and many others who'd left Europe after the war to settle in USA. We were all "white" but never even considered using the word. To this day, my identity is Irish, as a Mexican can be offended if I call him or her a Nicaraugan.

White priviledge we didn't have. Why? Because money we didn't have. But we had schools and libraries free to us, and that is all open to "people of disadvantage" throughout the USA. All they have to decide to do is use them. Everyday, hard study, and become model "minorities"... skip all the baloney and sports.

When a black professor of history came over to lecture us once from UC Berkeley, no one in the room had an ounce of "white guilt". We couldn't understand why he seemed to be angry at us, the children of lower middle class families, when we almost all hustled for afterschool and weekend jobs, rode the public buses, etc. etc.

Unfortunately, even a man of his education was color-blind in that he could not see a "white" person (be he as dark as a Southern Italian or white as a RUssian) without thinking that person had more power and money than him! And he was a professor!!!!

He called us all "lilywhite" when he walked into the classroom. We sixteen-year-olds asked at the end, "Excuse us, sir, but if you ARE a professor, can you tell US why MAYBE a Catholic school doesn't have a lot of black Americans in it?"